McObject — vendor of memory-centric DBMS eXtremeDB — is a tiny, tiny company, without a development team of the size one would think needed to turn out one or more highly-reliable DBMS. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about whether it’s a serious alternative to solidDB for embedded DBMS, e.g. in telecom equipment. However:

Comments

Curt – We are honored to be mentioned in your blog. I recently joined as the COO here and we haven’t had a chance to communicate before. I am not sure what it takes to qualify as tiny, but as measured by sales and profit we exceed many of our competitors and we are growing. There are lots of reasons for this success that I won’t bore you with here. Our customer list continues to grow, and keep your eyes open on Monday, when we will announce a new customer who will put eXtremeDB in the hands of up to 17 million new end users.

Having a smaller development team has its advantages. We’re more efficient and thus able to adapt faster to customers’, or the general market’s, needs. We often license our source code, so if for no other reason we are adherents of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy; our licensees need to be able to comprehend our code. Big teams tend to engineer big, overly complex systems. We don’t. Another happy by-product of that is a smaller code size and dramatically better performance than “the other guys”, without sacrificing functionality (we do have some nice features – thanks for mentioning that).

And thanks for the acknowledgement that we have turned out a highly reliable DBMS. I know our many customers agree, as would the millions of end-users that use our technology everyday without knowing (were it unreliable, we’d have a kind of notoriety that no company wants).

This looks very interesting. Presumably to some degree it competes with the Berkeley DB family, although it’s not the same thing, at least insofar as it has SQL and all that implies.

I was hoping to learn more from the “Company” part of the web site. When was the company founded? Who are the main technical people (CTO, VP Eng, whatever)? Less important but also interesting, who are the backers/financers?

Is the technology based on anything that we might have seen somewhere, such as university research?

It’s somewhat hard for me to see a small development team as an advantage. At Object Design, one reason we could quickly adapt to our customers’ needs is that we had enough developers to handle all those requests, while still developing the product, porting it, and so on. For us, it worked well.

Thanks for the comments, Daniel and Curt. During these exciting months of growth, attention to our web site has not been what it should. As such, one of the things that I have been driving since my arrival is an overhaul. This will improve the navigational aspects and add some of the content that you are looking for (yes, we do have a CTO who has also authored many articles). We are self funded and profitable, btw.

The technology was built from the ground up to be optimized for what it does. It isn’t based on any existing product but built on many years of experience with the good and bad aspects of other technologies.

Now the news we promised, involving up to 17 million new users, is this: DIRECTV has just licensed our eXtremeDB Fusion database system to manage programming data in its set-top boxes. Critical to their decision was eXtremeDB Fusion’s hybrid data storage capability – what Curt refers to above as ‘some kind of hybrid disk-centric/memory-centric operation.’ Check out our announcement at http://www.mcobject.com/pressroom.php?step=3&article=100.